Video reveals Kinect’s Project Milo was more than a tech demo

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When Project Natal, now Microsoft Kinect, was first announced at E3 2009, one of the most impressive demos was Project Milo.

Lionhead Studios and Peter Molyneux had created an experience that saw you interact with an on screen character named Milo. He would react to your speech and movements, and it looked to be a promising project. But then Microsoft stated it was just for demo purposes and would never be released as a game for Xbox 360.

A new video from director John Dower reveals that Project Milo was a lot more than just a demo. It had a full story, a substantial amount of behavior and interaction points already working, and a mass of motion capture data for Milo we never got to see.

The question now is why did Lionhead spend all this time employing a known director, hiring actors, writing a story, paying for extensive motion capture studio time, and producing what looks to be the base for a full game if Microsoft only ever wanted it to be a demo?

The only conclusion we can come to is that Lionhead fully intended Project Milo to be a game released on the system. Microsoft, however, decided it wasn’t worth the investment and killed it.

While on the face of it Project Milo looked like an incredibly promising and ground breaking experience, I am not surprised it got canned either by a Lionhead or Microsoft decision.

In order to work the game would have to solve a number of problems computers currently have issues handling. For one, natural language processing is far from perfect and a player would no doubt have to follow some rules to get Milo to react properly. That leads to unnatural speech killing the experience to a large extent. On top of that the game would have to deal with accents for each territory it was released in as well as multiple languages.

It’s also clear that Lionhead would not be offering a full sandbox experience. While Milo could learn from the player, it would be all preset learning based on the motion capture they had available and stored on the disc. There was also a full story to help things along and eventually leading to a conclusion. It’s difficult to see how that would work well when the player has to constantly be involved through interaction with Milo.

I don’t doubt that Lionhead learned a lot from developing Project Milo, most of which will be fed back into games like the Fable series. But the more you think about the work involved, and the difficulties that would have to be overcome for this to be a game, the more you realize why it could have never worked.